What is "slashdot"

vb. (context computing Internet English) To render a web site slow or unusable via the unusually large number of page requests that result from a link on a very popular web site.

Slashdot (sometimes abbreviated as /.) is a news website that originally billed itself as "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters". It features news stories on science and technology that are submitted and evaluated by its users. Each story has a comments section attached to it.

Slashdot was founded in 1997 by Hope College student Rob Malda, also known as "CmdrTaco", and classmate Jeff Bates, also known as "Hemos". In 2012, it was acquired by DHI Group, Inc. (i.e., Dice Holdings International, which created the Dice.com website for tech job seekers.)

Summaries of stories and links to news articles are submitted by Slashdot's own readers, and each story becomes the topic of a threaded discussion among users. Discussion is moderated by a user-based moderation system. Randomly selected moderators are assigned points (typically 5) which they can use to rate a comment. Moderation applies either -1 or +1 to the current rating, based on whether the comment is perceived as either "normal", "offtopic", "insightful", "redundant", "interesting", or "troll" (among others). The site's comment and moderation system is administered by its own open source content management system, Slash, which is available under the GNU General Public License.

In 2012, Slashdot had around 3.7 million unique visitors per month and received over 5300 comments per day. The site has won more than 20 awards, including People's Voice Awards in 2000 for "Best Community Site" and "Best News Site". Occasionally, a story will link to a server causing a large surge of traffic, which can overwhelm some smaller or independent sites. This phenomenon is known as the " Slashdot effect".